Ghana pays the price for our unwanted clothes

Sep 27, 2023

Western cast-offs are contributing to Ghana's flooding problems and hamper the country's fashion industry, writes Tim Gossling

The dumping of our unwanted clothes on developing countries is more pernicious even than your article suggests (Stop dumping your cast-offs on us, Ghanaian clothes traders tell EU, 31 May). What happens when we drop our unwanted clothes into certain charity shops is that they are gathered together into enormous bales of mixed clothing and shipped by the container-load to places such as Ghana.

Arriving at Ghana's port of Tema, they are then bid for by market traders, who take them home and sort out the contents into saleable and rubbish.

The rubbish ends up at Kantamanto in Accra, as you say, or blocking the drains and adding to Ghana's flooding problems. But the saleable clothes are sold on the street by the traders – often at "bend-down stores", where they are simply laid out on the ground. There, passersby can buy shirts, shorts and other items for a few cedis.

As well as the damage from the rubbish, Ghana's own clothing industry is badly hurt by the undercutting of their prices by the secondhand market. Ghana has a good clothing industry – I have several Ghana-made T-shirts that are of excellent quality and well designed – but the competition is undercutting it to the point of destruction. When we so kindly take our cast-offs to charity shops, we should remember that what we are doing to developing countries is sometimes not all beneficial. Tim Gossling Cambridge